Crash response unit //
Your partner in vision zero, safe streets, and fleet incident response
Evident’s Crash Response Unit (CRU) provides rapid response evidence preservation, investigation, and analysis services to provide accurate and reliable insight into what happened and how it happened.
Making data-driven decisions to eliminate severe injury and traffic fatalities requires reliable and accurate data.
The typical police accident report is a helpful tool for gathering basic information surrounding a traffic accident. While these reports often include opinions regarding the cause of the crash, it’s crucial to understand that those opinions are solely based on the observations of an officer on scene and cannot be considered well-founded or reliable for the purposes of understanding the cause or contributing factors of a crash.
At Evident, we understand and applaud municipal and regional efforts to make informed, data-driven, decisions to reduce severe traffic injuries and fatalities on our streets and roads. As experts in crash reconstruction, we feel it is our responsibility to advocate for the use of industry-recognized best practices in crash investigations which means we must call
Safety starts with understanding.
Getting to zero requires a deeper understanding of the crashes that happen on our streets and roads.
The mission of Vision Zero is to
40,000 deaths a year often cited as stubborn or difficult to tackle. Evident provides a true data-driven approaches to understanding and eliminating serious and fatal collisions. Police response is first layer to respond to all reported crashes and identify the crashes that would benefit from deeper understanding for preventative measures. Second layer is an Evident’s investigation and preservation of the scene. This allows evidence to be preserved and studied immediately or at a later time for trend analysis.
Modern vehicles are loaded with sensors that continuously monitor what the vehicle, and its driver, are doing. Some of the functions of these sensors include monitoring:
The speed of the vehicle
The steering wheel angle (i.e. the degree that the steering is turned to the left or right)
Brake pedal application by the driver
Accelerator pedal application percentage by the driver
Accelerations and/or forces to the vehicle during a collision.
Although the primary purpose of these sensors is to support important vehicle safety systems (like anti-lock brakes, traction control, stability control, and safety restraint systems), they also offer the opportunity to take a brief view of what the vehicle was doing in the moments before a collision occurred. What is typically referred to as an Event Data Recorder (EDR), is really just a system of recording and storing the observations and measurements made by these sensors in the moments (typically a five second period) leading up to a collision.
Remember: Event Data Recorders only record data when the vehicle was involVed in a crash
Example of typical crash data recorded by an Event Data Recorder.
did your vehicle record crash data?
Event Data Recorders are designed to record crash data when the vehicle experiences a predetermined crash severity (usually called the trigger or threshold). In general, the more significant the damage the more likely that crash data was recorded. If any of the vehicle’s airbags or seatbelt pretensioners deployed in the collision, crash data should have been recorded. However, there are exceptions to this rule and the presence of crash data is never guaranteed. Please contact us for specific questions regarding the likelihood of crash data being recovered from your vehicle.
Note: The presence of crash data is not limited to vehicles involved in frontal collisions. The images below are for demonstrative purposes only.
The three Honda Civics pictured below were all involved in frontal collisions but not all of them contained crash data.
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Unlikely to have crash data
Minor damage. Only plastic and thin metal components were bent or broken. No airbag deployments.
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Likely to have crash data
Moderate damage. Sturdy metal components and structures were bent and broken. No airbag deployments.
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Will have crash data
Severe damage. Sturdy metal components were substantially bent and displaced. Multiple Airbags deployed.
what about other electronic data?
Some vehicle’s record data for events other than crashes. Most notable is Toyota’s Vehicle Control History (VCH) data collected by the Techstream system.
This system records data similar to the vehicle’s Event Data Recorder but usually records a longer span of time and may even include timestamps and photographs taken by the vehicle!
Some events that trigger the recording of Toyota VCH include:
Sudden Braking
Rapid Accelerator Pedal Application
Sudden Turning
Antilock Brake System (ABS) Activation
Vehicle Stability Control (VSC) Activation
Autonomous Emergency Braking Activation
and more.
Warning: Toyota Vch data may be short lived!
Remember, this data is recorded by common daily driving events - not crashes. The most commonly recorded events, like sudden brake or accelerator applications, can be quickly overwritten if the vehicle is still being driven.